Navigation of hierarchical menus on small displays such as those found on mobile devices (e.g., mobile phones, smart phones, personal digital assistants, etc.) can be confusing, requiring a user to fully commit into a menu before they are certain that is what they want to do. Conventional navigation methods traverse a variety of menus in a graphical user interface (GUI) without preserving contextual information for the user—e.g. once within a menu item, there is no visual cue for the user to suggest how they got to the menu or what comes before it, after it, or how to get back to where they started from. After one of a series of displayed menu choices is selected, the choices disappear when the display is advanced into the menu choice. Moreover, navigation on a mobile phone is typically one-way, i.e. once a series of navigational inputs is performed, the reverse of the same series of inputs would not return the display to its original state.